Paper long abstract:

Paper examines four different exhibitions at Simon Janashia State Museum each corresponding to the state endorsed myths on nation in Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia and their internalization in the museum space. The exhibition on the Epoch of Shota Rustaveli organized in 1937, almost personal project of Joseph Stalin was formally dedicated to the 750th anniversary of Georgian epic Poet, Shota Rustaveli, both a personification of a Soviet dictator himself and archetype of Georgia as ancient civilization. After the wartime revival of the myth of autochthony and local patriotisms, in the beginning of 1950’s various plans were conceived on unified historical-archeological exhibition presenting Georgia’s past from pre-historical times up to its Sovietization. As a result, by the end of 1960’s, for the first time a linear story on Georgia’s suffering and resurrection was told through archeological, ethnographic objects and naturallia at Simon Janashia State Museum. In the context of destalinization and republican party leaders performing a balancing act between Kremlin and local nomenklatura a new museum was opened on the premises of Simon Janashia State Museum in 1973 named after People’s Friendship Museum. The exhibition concept in compliance with the cult of Great Patriotic war and people’s friendship was first of such kind across the entire Soviet Union. The late perestroika and post-independent period witnessed widespread iconoclasm and zeal to produce “right history” all over the post-Soviet space. New-found representations of contemporary history paved way to complete reversal of what counted as heroism and patriotism decades ago. Discourses on Soviet occupation in Georgia gained their ground especially after the Rose Revolution in 2003 and soon crystalized into a new foundational myth of now independent republic. Nevertheless, national history is still constituted by old narratives filled with brand-new content while public history spaces are still haunted with the ghosts of the past heroes and villains. It is already telling that the exhibition on Soviet Occupation in 2006 was organized in the same room hosting the exhibition on Soviet Georgia (part of the unified historical-archeological exhibition) less than a half century away. While asking how these exhibitions represent and reflect on historical events and concepts, I look at them as contact zones between state, official historiography, and the society at large; as mediums transmitting different meanings at different times through memory agents, texts, objects, and visual material all having their own agency and materiality.